Vulpes Dolosus
Molon Labe.
General Tso's Alliance
2158
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Posted - 2014.09.27 22:18:00 -
[1] - Quote
[Please read the whole thread before commenting, this is not a QQ thread, hopefully giving honest feedback and requests]
TL;DR: Dropships are in a good place now. Remove hardener/booster animation from turrets. Add my changes to mCRUs (very low fitting cost, skill bonus to respawn time, ability to be toggled on and off). Slight increase to maneuverability.
With the new changes to DSs, I decided to give the ol' Myron a try again. After experimenting on protofits for a bit I decided to try this fit. A very skill intensive fit, needing high core skills for all the active mods and shield fitting 4. It is able to fit any proto turret (with a little tweaking) but I decided not to because of cost.
With only one gunner, the only other person in my squad, I though I'd first try and judge its viability against AV rather than overall combat effectiveness. Thanks to the buffs I was able to survive against some modest AV on the other team. 2-3 swarmers of unknown tier were successfully escaped, along with a swarmer and assault forger another time. I was shot down several times over the course of a few games.
Now that I was convinced of my defenses, it was time to bring the offensive. I decided to be a little more bold when engaging enemy AV, trusting my gunner to eliminate threats as I called them. Due to the huge potency of enemy AV, I'm virtually forced to use a hardener. The benefits of this are great: my large buffer gets multiplied to about 5.8k shield, the booster grants about 1.3k hep from its base 900hp, and my passive reps go from 224 to about 373ehp/s. However, a huge problem was discovered (actually, it's been a problem for a long time now, but that's beside the point).
Due to the hardener animation (the big blue glow-y hexagons), my gunners vision is greatly impaired. The animation seems to raise off the turret a few inches and the bright glow blackens the background considerably. It's so bad that my gunner said he couldn't even see the orange chevrons of an enemy 30m away.
This is absolutely crippling for a DS. It doesn't matter how defensive or agile you make it, if it can't fight back it gets walled by every form and tier of AV. It is perfectly feasible for a dropship to engage moderate AV and win, but this hardener problem ruins all chances of fighting back (if I use it my gunner can't see, if I don't I'm virtually defenseless). I would like to know if there's any way of fixing this, either removing it from turrets completely, toning down the intensity of it, and/or making it more transparent.
Aside from that, it's working fairly well. There are just a few other things I'd like to point out and request:
mCRUs are still going to be underutilized. One of the biggest problems is their fitting. Looking at my fit above, there's virtually nothing I can swap 1-for-1 to an mCRU for and expect it to be viable. If the fitting for the mCRU was a lot lower, I could tier-up one of my other mods to make up for the "lost" slot. Other considerations for the mCRU are to add a spawn time bonus of -10% per level (lvl5 equals the best links, balanced for the skill and hardware requirements imo), and the ability to turn it on an off at will (to prevent blueberries from spawning in my ship all the time), as well as fixing all of its bugs (not showing up all the time).
Last thing I want to ask Santa Rattati and the DEVs for is a slight increase in DS role/pitch/yaw speed (not acceleration). The increase in swarm prevalence makes getting hit by several swarms at once difficult to recover from. I'm not asking for ADS level maneuvering (though that needs a buff too, I'll probably post in a later thread), just a bit more to recover in a more reasonable time.
Thanks for reading, let's keep it civil guys. I don't want any ADS QQ in this thread.
Dust was real! I was there!
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